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H.264 VA-API GPU Video Acceleration For Flash

09-23-2009, 09:40 AM

Phoronix: H.264 VA-API GPU Video Acceleration For Flash

Splitted Desktop Systems, the embedded device company that previously wrote VA-API support for MPlayer and FFmpeg along with a NVIDIA VDPAU back-end for VA-API, has made another significant contribution to improved video playback under Linux. Splitted Desktop Systems has now implemented VA-API acceleration support within Gnash, the free software implementation of the Adobe Flash/SWF player. Gwenole Beauchesne of Splitted Desktop Systems shares that the H.264 video playback performance has improved significantly thanks to this VA-API support and with 1080p clips it's working out much better than Adobe's own proprietary Flash 10 player for Linux...

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Depending on how this is implimented, it could completely invalidate gnash as a viable Free Software flash player.

H.264 is heavily patented. If these acceleration API's impliment any actual decoding, then gnash wouldn't be legally distributable in countries (like the US) that recognize software patents.

Using patent-encumbered technology intentionally is a sure bet that business users or serious distros like Fedora or Ubuntu will never include it in their base distro.

I really hope these API's are nothing but pointers that tell the proprietary video driver to do the actual decoding, rather than doing the decoding themselves and simply using the video card (via the driver) to do the calculations.

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Those guys have just slapped Adobe in the face so hard I say it was well worth it.

Just how did they slap Adobe in the face? There's still tons of Flash content Gnash can't play at all, I'd prefer time spent on getting higher Flash version support more than hacking around with video acceleration. (who watches that high quality content over Flash anyway that this improvement matters a bit?)

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Just how did they slap Adobe in the face? There's still tons of Flash content Gnash can't play at all, I'd prefer time spent on getting higher Flash version support more than hacking around with video acceleration. (who watches that high quality content over Flash anyway that this improvement matters a bit?)

Adobe with all their developers, the very *creators* of flash, still hasn't managed to implement hardware accelerated video decoding in their player. A free, undermanned project managed to beat them to the punch.

Maybe Adobe should just scratch their proprietary player on Linux and start helping out the Gnash developers?

Not unexpected, given Adobe's past record, but still hilarious. Besides, this brings us one step closer getting rid of the proprietary flash player. The sooner we get there, the better for all of us (besides Adobe, I guess).